Absences in VL

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

Dave Morris writes:

>Vietnam, so absent in the pages of VL

So very true . . . During this most recent "fecoventilatory
colission"regarding the relative utility of annotations to references
that are, at least within certain interpretive communities, obvious, I
paused to consider the utility of Peter Petto's excursus on the Vietnam
War (and my own tu'penny/hae'penny contributions thereto).  

In the midst of my own defensive reflex--jeez, isn't Vietnam damn
important, don't some of the yung'uns need the hear about it?--I began
pondering on the fact that the Southeast Asian conflict is, of course,
one of the notable absences in VL.  I make no pretensions toward
originality in this observation; I'm sure one or more of the 1990 reviews
mentioned this absence, and it has doubtless been batted around many
times on this list, before I arrived to crudely cobble together my own
version of the now-passe wheel, but this is certainly a lacuna worthy of
some thought.

The ‘intentional fallacy' notwithstanding, the relative absence Vietnam
is surely advertent, the P-man athis most impish, giving us a novel in
part about the sixties with barely a nod to the pachyderm in the parlor. 
Vietnam appears in chapter 11 as the source of marijuana.  Not to knock
the ganja, but interesting that one of the War's few appearances is as a
means of transmission of one part of the holy trinity
sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll.  

In the PR(cubed) we have a campus in revolt, not over the War, but, as we
are told repeatedly, over getting laid, listening to the stereo, weed,
and--did I mention?--getting laid.  In shades of _Life of Brian_ (1979),
the soul of marijuana, Weed Atman, stumbles quite accidentally into
leadership of this movement.  This picture of campus in revolt brings to
mind Cornell in 1959, as related by sometime school chum Farina.  Like
the COTS, the kids at Athene were in it for the good times--the campus
erupts to protest curfews and rules against Lairville males marauding
into the fortresses of abstinence on the hill.  And of course there was
dope smoking with Vampires in the barn and the paregoric Pall Mall. 
1959, Pynchon told us in his introduction, was another planet.  Perhaps
not, since he seems to have given us a version of Farina's Cornell on the
West Coast in the sixties.  

But, at this ill-formed stage of my thoughts on the subject, I don't see
VL's take on this phenomenon as the kind of free and liberatory, though
absurd spectacle of Athene in full hormonal revolt.  He's giving us, I
think, an empty revolt, disconnected from any Grand
Politics--self-absorbed and, in the bad sense, childish.  

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties 
left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While 
the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all 
kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the 
deep . . . need only to stay children forever, safe inside some 
extended national Family."

I dunno . . . whadd'yall think.  Food for thought, or just indigestion?
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